New Zealand is no stranger to punching above its weight in sporting achievements. With the obvious standout of rugby (even if not recently), we’re constantly performing well per capita in practically every form of athletic competition.
Yet, despite the acclaim, there are areas like eSports where New Zealand isn’t close to the front of the pack. While we have a few famous standouts, NZ’s eSports performance isn’t quite up to snuff with its more physical cousins, so why is this?
A Matter of Culture
When looking at rowing, rugby, cricket, and so many other major and minor physical sports, huge portions of our interest are born from cultural idealism and pressure. Men and women are taught to idolise the All Blacks in particular, and as a culture, we highly value many aspects of physical performance. These are areas we take enormous pride in, and it’s been that way for generations.
Raised in such an environment, it’s no surprise we grow up seeing the potential in trying to be the best. These are the heroes of our corner of the world, and the victories on the world stage are held up as proof that our size belies our potential. Esports, on the other hand, enjoys no such legacy.
While video games have been popular in NZ since the 1970s as mentioned at Te Ara, we’ve never taken a huge amount of pride in performing well in this area. This could tie into the longstanding belief that many hold that video games aren’t serious forms of competition when compared to physical sports, but a lot of it also has to do with community. Competition breeds growth, and in the corner of the Pacific, that can be a problem.
Finding Competition
At its core, interactive online experiences require a certain level of online speed. For an example of when this works well, consider online gambling experiences. If we look at Duelz Casino, we can see it offers titles from big developers like NetEnt and Microgaming, while working just as well on mobile and computer systems. No matter where in the world you are, there is no degradation or downsides to how this casino or its games operate, but the same cannot be said for video games.
In video games, the most important aspect that drives better players is better competition. In a local sense, New Zealand is so sparsely populated that physical meetups are uncommon. Instead, we turn to the internet. The internet suffers a similar problem of limited community, however.
While bandwidth is important in online games, more crucial and unsurmountable is the issue of latency or the amount of time it takes for a signal to perform a round trip. As Optimum explains, good latency is any delay of less than 40ms. Anything more than this, and there is too much delay, which negatively affects gameplay.
The problem here comes from how latency is essentially an unsolvable problem for NZ. We are simply too far away from larger population centres like east Asia or the western United States to be able to compete with the highest tier of players. The latency implied by this amount of distance cannot be overcome, as it relates to the speed of light being too slow, so without travelling, NZ can’t experience everything the world has to offer.
Combined, culture and internet limitations mean that it’s difficult for New Zealanders to be driven to compete in the highest level of eSports, and even if we do, we’ll be a step behind the players of major population centres.
Though this doesn’t mean we’ll never be able to produce top-tier talent, it does explain why we don’t perform as well as we do in other sports.
While cultural shifts and a greater gaming population will alleviate this problem somewhat, it’s always going to be a challenge standing in our way.
